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Bungie Timeline

Minotaur was initially supposed to ship on April 1st, 1992, but slipped because the game wasn't finished, according to an interview Jason Jones gave to Inside Mac Games in October of 1993.

Minotaur was produced entirely by Jones, and had started as an Apple ][ game. It required a network or modem connection to play against human opponents; there was no single-player experience at all. As such, it was the first real netgame for the Mac. Minotaur a fantasy game with a top-down view that used tile-based graphics, similar to the early Ultima games.

Bungie planned on shipping Pathways into Darkness, their new game, at MacWorld in Boston, starting on August 1, 1993. While I've been unable to locate confirmation that it actually shipped by that date, posts in Usenet indicate that it did ship sometime between August 1st and August 13.

On August 30, Jason Jones posts in comp.sys.mac.games that while Bungie isn't working on a sequel to Pathways, that future Bungie games would use texture mapping and AppleTalk networking.

At the second MacWorld show that year, this time in Boston, Bungie demonstrates the greatly revamped Marathon game, with a graphics engine rewritten since earlier in the year and an entirely new plotline.

Bungie supposedly tells showgoers that the game will ship "in two weeks" according to the Marathon Scrapbook, saying they were waiting only on the boxes.

After agonizing delays and fan outcries since August, the release date that Bungie promised at MacWorld Boston that year, Marathon finally ships just before Christmas of 1994, a fully texture-mapped first person shooter with an engrossing science fiction plot.

The game takes place on the sprawling colony ship Marathon, hollowed out from Deimos, a moon of Mars. Told through a series of text terminals, a Byzantine plot gradually unfolds telling a story of military cyborgs, rampant artificial intelligences, and alien slavers.

Myth is obviously not a first-person shooter, as Bungie's last three games (the Marathon Trilogy) were, and represent the company's first foray into Real-Time Strategy games, although some hardcore fans remark that the lack of resource management and other features mean they are more accurately called Real-Time Tactical games.

Less than 12 months after announcing the title, and slightly less than two years after their own last full game release (Marathon 2, for which they created the engine and the scenario in-house) Bungie ships Myth, a completely new game with a new engine, a new story, in a completely different genre. To boot, it marks the company's first cross-platform release, shipping simultaneously for Macs and PCs.

Myth won several awards, not only from Mac game publications but from PC gaming magazines as well.

At E3 in 1998, a little over six months after shipping their first Myth game, Bungie announces the sequel.

At the same time, video from the Bungie West project is shown. The game they are working on is Oni, a third-persion action game incorporating martial arts and firearms, with an anime-like visual style and themes very similar to the film Ghost in the Shell.

A little more than a year after shipping the original game, Myth 2 is released, again for both Mac and Windows platforms, with a completely new scenario developed in-house and a revamped game engine.

Bungie had attempted to do everything right: improve the engine of their award-winning game, do development cross-platform from the beginning, and do a simultaneous release of a killer strategy game on hybrid media in time for Christmas.

Seven months after releasing Myth 2, at Macworld in New York, Bungie shows the original Halo announcement trailer, which is running in real-time using OpenGL on a Macintosh computer. There had been rumors earlier in the year about a game people thought was code-named "Blam".

Steve Jobs originally stated Halo would be released "early next year" but there was no confirmation of this from Bungie's side.

Sixteen months after announcing the game for the Mac and Windows platform, Bungie ships Halo as a launch title for the first edition of Microsoft's Xbox console, in the interim having been purchased by Microsoft. According to many reports, however, the game had been in development possibly since the shipping of Myth 2, putting the total development time at slightly less than three years.

Nearly three years to the day after shipping the first game and twenty-nine months after announcing the title, Bungie ships Halo 2 and delivers the Xbox its first-- and only-- profitable quarter to date, shattering single-day sales records in the entertainment industry. The game is one of the last truly groundbreaking titles for the console, which will be replaced by the Xbox 360 in a year's time, and gets a stranglehold on the Xbox Live leaderboard, achieving the top spot in terms of the number of players on the service every single week since its release until the present day.

Halo 3 ships in North America and does $170 million in sales its first day, smashing single-day entertainment industry figures, on the way to $300 million its first week and doubling the weekly sales of the Xbox 360 console.

In a deal naming almost no specifics, Bungie Studios, a wholly owned unit of Microsoft's Microsoft Games Division, becomes the privately held Bungie LLC, with minority Microsoft shareholding and a long-term Halo publishing deal.

A small team at Bungie works on an expansion pack that expands to the size of a complete title, featuring a single player campaign that follows a team of ODSTs that drop into New Mombasa during the timeline of Halo 2. Introduced the new Firefight mode, allowing players to tackle increasing waves of Covenant on multiplayer maps, either solo or with other players using splitscreen, LAN or Xbox Live.

The last game in the Halo series produced under contract by Bungie is released for the Xbox 360. Some consider it to retcon the events of the Fall of Reach as depicted in the novelization. It focuses on a mixed group of Spartan II/III soldiers and features Dr. Halsey, Captain Keyes and Cortana, but not the Master Chief.

Court proceedings involving Activision reveal what appears to be a legitimate copy of the contract between Activision and Bungie for their new intellectual property, Destiny, which is intended to have a series of cross-platform releases with DLC over the next decade.